Gordon Brown and George Osborne offered their individual visions of how Britain and the world can recover from the economic crisis yesterday, with the Prime Minister calling for a return to the values of the good society, where banks recommit to their fundamental role.

Documents detailing Government plans to rule from an underground bunker have been revealed.

WHAT WE WILL DO

I first saw Shams Kareem rocking back and forth on the floor of her home in Baghdad last February. At the sound of a visitor, she stood up and fumbled along the wall with her arms stretched out. “Carry, carry,” she called. Then she nuzzled my neck and wrapped her arms around me.

Hussein Mohammed Janabi is a loving little boy who adores his younger siblings, Amneh, 3, and six-month-old twins Zeid and Sajad. But his parents find it difficult to answer him when he asks — as he often does — “Why are they beautiful and I am not?”

The first sight of Abdullah Suleiman isn’t for the faint-hearted: when he was six years old the bottom half of his face was blown away by a car bomb. The excruciating cost of war in Iraq is written in the crisscross lines of stitches holding his rebuilt nose and mouth in place.

THE wife of John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, was dismissed from a City public relations firm after claims she he had misled the company about having a degree from Oxford University.

A TORY peer has paid nearly £1.5m for the only double Victoria Cross awarded during the first world war.

THE health minister, Ann Keen, is facing a parliamentary inquiry after receiving £12,000 in expenses for an office at home, despite having three other official workplaces.

UP TO a third of large country houses sold in the past four years have been bought by foreign buyers, according to new research.

THE Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has taken the first steps towards receiving Anglican converts en masse.

SPEND a pound and save the rainforest. A conservation group led by a millionaire sports tycoon and a former Labour minister is launching an appeal today to recruit 100,000 green heroes to protect trees in the Amazon.

GORDON BROWN has ordered defence chiefs to find a way of pulling some troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to senior defence sources.

Italian prosecutors demanded life sentences yesterday for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, her former boyfriend, for murdering the British student Meredith Kercher in a hate-and drug-fuelled sexual assault.

MILLIONS of bank customers will be in line for payouts totalling up to £6 billion if a Supreme Court judgment on current account charges goes against the banks this week.

COUPLES who squabble outside the school gates could be advised to take relationship counselling under a government initiative to stop parents arguing in front of their children.

IT IS one of the biggest selling books of all time but a secret deal over royalties from The Little Prince has come back to haunt the author’s family.

THE barrow boy is back. Except this time it is not the man in the pinstriped blazer bellowing share prices in the City but the traditional street trader starting out with a market stall before making millions.

After a byzantine Brussels stitch-up, the appointment to one of the grandest jobs in the European Union was settled by text message. Early on Thursday evening Baroness Ashton, an obscure Labour quangocrat, received a text message from her mentor, Jose Manuel Barroso, the chairman of the European commission.

FIVE disgraced former directors of MG Rover, the failed Midlands car maker, are to receive an early Christmas present with an £11m-plus payout from the wreckage of the firm.